I'm month two into my 6-month project to build 6 SaaS applications in 6 months. I started work on the 2nd SaaS a month ago, and it's Blether.chat - a GDPR Compliant Live Chat that integrates with Slack. How did I come up with the idea for Blether? I hate cookie consent banners so I don't want to have them on my site, but at the same time, I wanted to be able to chat with potential customers for Parthenon. Therefore I needed one that would allow me to do that without adding a cookie banner. The answer is Blether.
Development
In the past, I had been able to create an MVP in about 7-days, mainly thanks to Parthenon. But this one took about 14-21 days to reach MVP status and another week of marketing prep before I started to show it to the world.
Week One
Week one was mostly getting the raw functionality to work. My first day was creating a basic service that would relay chat messages between Slack and a WebSocket connection. For a good few hours, I did think I was over my head but considering I finished up the first day with a system that would relay messages between Slack and a WebSocket connection and could handle multiple WebSocket connections, I think I was probably being extremely premature about how hard this would actually be. I then focused on the basic functionality of adding a widget with one line of HTML that included a Javascript file and the whole building the html—and creating a chat room in Slack per conversation and linking it directly to a specific site.
By the end of week one, I had an ugly but functional live chat deployed on getparthenon.com.
Week Two
Since no one will use an ugly live chat. The first thing I did this week was redesigned the live chat widget based on others that currently exist. And then I worked on the web UI, improved the Slack Integration by providing more information to the chat agent, fetching the online status of chat agents via their Slack Status, etc.
Week Three
At this point, I had reached the MVP in terms of functionality. I however still wanted to do some tweaking. I wanted to have another application dashboard instead of the default Parthenon one. This meant some work redesigning the internal pages. Mostly changing the wrapper div classes.
I also spent some time integrating ClickHouseDB. Due the fact to get the config for the Blether widget, I need to make an HTTP request, I would use this call and add in analytics. While not the prime use case, I thought it would be a nice secondary feature, and it would allow for attaching the user's web session to the chat request so pre-sales chat agents could understand how serious the lead is.
I also started work on the landing page. The overwhelming feedback was the design was utterly terrible. I mean, everyone basically had the exact same feedback and I asked in multiple places.
Week Four
Started off by redesigning the landing page. I went for a more classic plain look instead of trying something out of the box again. I then started do run through all the functionality on the production site, which was a good thing I did because I encountered some serious issues, such as the slack permissions not being up to date in the production app. So my active connection had the correct permissions but new ones didn't so. That was the most significant bug I found. I found various other ones and fixed those.
Pricing
Pricing seems to be one of the things that founders struggle with the most. You want to cheap enough that people will give you a chance but not so cheap that can't make any profit. This has been on my mind for the past few days.
Currrent
My first attempt at pricing has it at
A free plan €10 a month for the entry-level plan €25 a month for the professional plan.
With yearly plans coming with 2 months free.
Lifetime Deal
I want to try the lifetime deal approach at launching to get a decent amount of users to start off getting feedback from.
Currently, I have a lifetime deal on the site at €99 for entry and €249 for professional.
While I could give it a few weeks or months, I think if I want to get users quickly then AppSumo might be the place to try. As it stands, you get 90% of the sale if you bring the customer and 70% of the sale if it's from a pre-existing AppSumo customer.
Conclusion
I'm going to raise the prices! It's been 2-days since I started to push Blether, and I'm raising the prices already.
I want to do €149 on AppSumo with only one lifetime deal for the entry-level. To make this price look good in comparison, I'm going to raise the price from €10 to €29 and €25 to €49.
Marketing Ideas
So I've shared it on various sites such as Reddit, Hacker News, SaaShub, etc. This is getting some traffic but not that much, nothing like the hundreds or thousands that many people say they get from their initial launch.
Copy Plausible's approach
One thing I'm going to try and do is copy Plausible's approach to content marketing which is to provide high quality blog posts on the subject at hand. My first blog post will be an overview of things developers need to know about becoming GDPR compliant that is up to date with recent judgements. I've noticed that alot of people don't understand why Google Analytics is not compliant or why Google Fonts not being compliant is actually for a different reason. Also, many people think a deletion request must always be done, when there are exceptions and blindly deleting data can result in losing charge back or legal disputes since the data was legally required. Previously, I've been writing lots of content this time I'm going to spend a week or two writing this blog post and make it as high a quality blog post as possible.
AppSumo
They have an audience and it's an audience with a high intention to buy. You go to AppSumo for one of two reasons, one to sell and the other one to buy. Most of their users are there to buy.
While this is not a long-term strategy, it is a short-term strategy to get users who I can get feedback from.
Freemium
I want to have a generous free plan that will result in lots of sites having the widget installed and lots of people seeing Blether's name and clicking the link to the Blether site.
Marketing Free Apps
I do have a 6 SaaS in 6 Months project going on, and I really want to focus on Blether for the next 3-months to give it a solid chance. So to complete my original project and to help marketing efforts for Blether, I'll build micro SaaS that are free(mium?). That are related in some way. For example, a website checker to see if it's compliant with GDPR and consent banners. This can provide a source of traffic via people using the free tool and then finding out about Blether.
Conclusion
This month has been super fun development-wise. It's also a weird feeling building an MVP in such a validated market. There are so many competitors, all of whom have very mature applications with lots of features and polish that I won't have for quite some time.
If you made it this far, you should check out Blether. It has a free plan, and if you're quick enough there will still be the €99 LTD available, if not you'll still be able to get one at €149.